Build Habits to Increase Effectiveness

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Today’s culture has lost its grip on productivity because it has abandoned one of its best support mechanisms. I encourage you to read this post and learn some old tricks that will support you for the rest of your life.

Intention

Today’s generation enjoys the privileges of spontaneity. Impulse buying, random TV watching, ubiquitous choice, self-indulgence and untamed spirits are the rule of the day.

Today people are guided by such maxims as: If it feels good – do it! Just Do It! Please Yourself! Have it your way! And so on.

Self-determination has been exalted to the level of a lifestyle, where people are motivated by whatever their latest intention is. Everyone seeks to be able to do what they want to do, the way they want to do it, and when they want to do it. Human “intention” thus rules their lives.

It could also be described as “impulse living“. When people feel inclined to eat they will pull into a fast food place and eat. When they feel like taking a movie, the movie houses have multiple choices and multiple screening times to suit each person’s predilection.

People resent missing out, or having to wait, or having to tame their intention. Thus we see evidence of impulse violence and such things as road rage. Another word for impulse living is an untamed spirit.

Historical Motivators

Before today’s highly self-indulgent lifestyles, where people can afford to indulge themselves, people had two other anchors to their lifestyles which are less evident today. People guided their lives by moral standards which they learned from the Christian training. Generations of westerners built for today’s wealth and prosperity, by upholding moral standards which restrained their choices and guided their actions.

Today’s impulsive, self-serving citizens are destroying the society which their forebears built up through godliness, morality and discipline which today’s citizens either know nothing about or despise as repressive and restrictive.

Habits and Routine

Along with the moral basis for people’s lives there was also a suite of disciplines which people were subjected to. These disciplines, mostly externally imposed, taught people to develop internal personal disciplines. Those disciplines empowered them to tame their spirit, defer gratification, submit to authority, achieve tasks, handle responsibility and so on.

Along with those disciplines were a variety of habits and routines, which served the disciplined life. Educators, parents, societies, employers, churches and families relied on various habits and routines to ensure they maintained their performance standards and achieved the objectives they had to meet.

Habit is a powerful motivator and can be an effective change agent.

Building Support Systems

Many things cannot be achieved on pure motivation alone. Disciplines are incredibly important but they have been sacrificed on the altar of self-determination. Today’s generation has generally reacted to historical expressions of ritual, tradition and discipline, yet those very processes provide powerful resource to life and lifestyle.

Habits that are put in place with understanding and personal commitment become powerful supports to personal achievement of objectives. Traditions, liturgy and the like are very valuable.

Paying for Motivation

Evidence that today’s generation has lost resolve and the discipline muscle in the pursuit of self-will can be seen in the way people engage external motivators and disciplinarians to help them enforce their own will.

We have spawned burgeoning industries of support staff, such as personal trainers for fitness, business coaches for our business activities, financial advisors to guide our investments and even psychologists to tell us how to manage our emotions and thoughts.

People pay money to others to motivate them, due to their own lack of discipline.

Resolve to Build Habits

You don’t need to pay someone else to live your life for you. You have been given divine endowment to rule your own life and to work toward great achievement and success. Your problem is that you have given up that ability, due to the seduction of a culture that worships your independence, self-will and spontaneity.

I challenge you to choose, or resolve to build a habit. Find something that is worthy of your attention and make it a godly habit in your life. For example, read through the Bible once each year. Pray for twenty minutes every morning. Read a Christian classic each week (or month if you are slow reader).

Rule Your Spirit

As you try to set up a good habit you will probably come across your own limitations. You will probably drop the ball and want to give up on your new process. That willingness to give up indicates that you have lost rule over your own spirit. Discouragement, self-indulgence or other things have weakened your resolve.

Don’t give in to that weakness, but press on to gain rule over your own spirit, so you can build yet more godly disciplines into your life. Yielding your will to God’s claim on your life is channelling it to wise habits and routines. This can be done as an act of worship.

If you really think you need an external trainer to keep you going, then ask God to step in and discipline you. He is the best personal trainer of all.

Finding Time by Making Time

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In a previous post (Finding Time for Important Things) I pointed out that the things we think are priorities in our lives are actually “imagined priorities”. Our Real Priorities can easily be determined by what we spend our life doing.

When you give your time, energy and life over to a bunch of mundane things that you don’t want to eat up your life, you are actually giving them the right to eat up your life. Your imagined priorities are fake, since you never get around to them.

A Life Consumed

Most people do not live their life, but they simply burn it up in the fire of activities they are trapped in. Most people get caught in useless cycles which steal, kill and destroy their potential and destiny. Time, talent, energy, creativity, potential, significance and the like, get burned up in some very ordinary things, such as the job, bills, domestic routine, trivial friendships, daydreaming, amusement, cheap entertainment, trivial activities, pointless processes, and so on.

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Stop Worshiping the Ordinary

People worship very ordinary things with all their time, energy and mental and emotional faculties. They throw away decades of their life trying to empty the “IN” tray, only to have it filled up by others who don’t care about how they consume other people’s lives.

When people submit to that routine, pacing the treadmill of mundane chores, they give up all the “important things” and make the ordinary into their life obsession.

Work Will Finish You

I recently heard someone comment on the vanity of trying to get the job done. They were not talking about the importance of completing our tasks, but about the overall sense that work consumes us and never says “Thank You!”

All your endeavours to get on top of things is futile. The painting will need to be done again. The yard will need to be mowed again. What has been done will have to be re-done at some time. The customers will need new products. The current designs will need updating. The latest model will one day be insufficient for the task. And so it goes.

Work will never yield to your efforts. So don’t get excited about spending your life on the work that presents itself to you.

As one of my friends put it recently, “The Work Will Finish Us! We Will Never Finish It!”

Back to Priorities

The stuff that consumes your life probably does not deserve to eat up as much of you as you let it do. Your job and your workload could probably be scaled back with little real effect. But you may well have become so emotionally and energetically locked in to what you are doing that you let it simply eat you up.

So let’s get back to your priorities. Look again at those things you say are “important”. If they really should be important, how about taking time out of those things that are eating you up, and making time for those important things!

The only way to find time for important things is to take time off lesser things that you have allowed to gobble up your years. Remember, those things are never going to be conquered. Once you are dead and gone there will be others being eaten up by the never ending list of things to do.

So harness your life and set some new priorities, not by writing a list, but by changing what you do to fit something new in.

Go on. I know you can do it!

Finding Time for Important Things

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Have you ever noticed that there are some things you just never find time to do? You want to do them, but years slip by and they just never get done. How can you find time for those important things?

Time Management is About Priorities

Believe it or not, the problem with getting important things done is priorities. In those months and years when you did not do those things you always intended to do, you managed to do a bunch of other things. You found time for work, friends, family, projects, learning, chores, and so on. You had the full complement of time – unless you were imprisoned or hospitalised, or the like.

In all you did do, using all the time that anyone has, you did not make a priority of the ‘important things’ you thought you should do. But you did find time for a lot of other things. Many of those other things did not deserve to displace the important things, but they took that place none-the-less.

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Imagined Priorities

Write a list of ten things that you believe deserve highest priority in your life. Include the things that deserve to be given time. Things that build toward your future, or involve the important relationships in your life, will probably be on your list.

Most of the things that end up on your list will be your “imagined priorities“. These are the things your conscience tells you should be top priorities. These are the things that you believe in sentimentally.

Now, write a list of the ten things that you actually do give priority to. Include the things that take up most of your time, your thoughts, your emotional energy and your devotion.

This is the list of your “real” priorities. They are real, because they are the priorities you actually give time and attention to. And it is this list that proves that your first list is of “imagined” priorities.

Reality Check

Those “important things” you don’t get done are left out because they are not really important to you. What is important to you is linked to the things you actually do get done.

If you waste time on amusements or trivial conversations, instead of getting the study, work, or other things done, then your true priority is the right to waste time. If you don’t find time for the “important” people in your life, then they are not really important to you. You know that they “should” be important and so you give sentimental lip-service to them. Your actions, however, confirm that they are not as important as you say, when it comes down to how you really live.

You Will Never Find the Time

You will never find the time for “important things” that are not really important to you. You are deluding yourself. You are refusing to see the truth about yourself, by telling yourself your priorities are different to the way you live. You shield yourself against your failure, but upholding noble thoughts. But those noble ambitions are a cover. What you really do tells us who you really are!

You will never find the time for those things you talk about. Your talk is a smoke-screen. You cannot be believed to uphold those noble or “important things” until you do those “important things”.

You Have to Make Time

You will never find the time you need to get things done. The object is not to “find” time, but to MAKE time. When you get up and do what has to be done, you have MADE the time.

Don’t ever look for the time, MAKE it!

So stop fooling yourself with the sentimental idea that you have high priorities. It’s time to start changing the way you live.

Do It! And Do it Now!

Start reading a chapter of the Bible, Today! Phone that important loved one, Now! Pull out that unfinished project and get back to it, Today!

When the phone rings and someone wants to eat up some of your time, tell them you’ll have to get back to them later. When someone wanders in and starts rambling on about something, politely ask them if you can get back to them when you’ve finished the thing you have to do.

If you don’t make the time you will lose it. So, get to it, Now!

Note: This theme is continued in a follow up post titled Finding Time by Making Time. Click this link to go to that post now…. FINDING TIME BY MAKING TIME.

The Tyranny of Time

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I have had the privilege of learning about time management from some well respected exponents on the subject. Yet my own time management has never been exemplary. Consciousness of time and tasks can become burdensome reality to many. So time management is a pretty important issue in our lives, especially for those who wish to be high achievers and who need to squeeze all they can out of their available time.

A Time Management Question

Here’s a time management question for you, to help you reflect on some of the philosophical issues of harnessing available time.

“There is never enough time to get everything done, so what are you going to do?”

Now, before you launch off with off-the-cuff answers, let me refine the question a little for you. Let’s image a scenario in which to address this question. Let’s imagine a situation where a person does not have a boss. Maybe they are running their own business, or just managing their life without having to be told what to do, such as a salesman might do.

The point of removing the boss is to have a situation where the person must make their own decisions about time management. If a person is overloaded with work given them by a boss they can always revert to the boss and let the boss solve the problem. I am creating a scenario that does not have that option.

The Scenario

So, we are considering a person trying to achieve various things, but with never enough time to get everything done. Let’s assume that by the end of each day there is at least one more task on the list than there had at the beginning of the day. This just goes on each day, ad infinitum. There is just not enough time to get everything done.

Now, if you were in that situation what would you do?

The Options

One possibility is that you could kill yourself trying to catch up. Since there is never enough time to get everything done (as is my starting premise), there is the option of becoming totally buried and burdened by the tasks. You could, for instance, just spend every waking moment chasing the list of things to do, pushing through them like a galley slave rowing across the ocean.

Some people chose this option. They become a pawn to their workload, ever struggling upstream against it. The work eats up their life and their time and their energy and just about everything else.

Is that how you face your workload?

Alternatively you could just give up. You could realise that the task is undo-able and just not bother trying to do it. “Why bother?” No matter how hard you try you can’t tame the demands, so you will have to leave many things undone. If you have to leave anything undone, then why should you have to do anything at all? Why not leave it ALL undone?

Some people lean toward this option. These are the minimalists. They do as little as they can get away with, because they have lost all heart for the tasks. They feel defeated by the challenge and just can’t face pressing on at all.

Two Extremes

Those two extreme positions stand in contrast to each other. Yet they summarise the limits of our choices. Your approach to the things you have to accomplish will be somewhere between complete slavery to the tasks and complete abandonment.

Some of you are workaholics, completely enslaved to the “To Do” lists in your life. For some that is the secret to their success. For others it is the treadmill that will consume their lives.

Others are work-refusers. They avoid tasks like they avoid leprosy. What they have to do they do as quickly and casually as they can. If they can get out of a task they will go out of their way to do it.

Time is Not the Issue

In either of the extremes which I have drawn out of the simple scenario the issue is not a matter of time-management. The issue is that of heart attitude. It is a character issue.

We are not measured by what we achieve or how clever we are at managing the time allotted to us. We are measured by the “who” that we become along the way.

If you become a slave and elevate tasks above the rest of your life, then that is the “who” that you have become. If you become slack and defeated, then that is the “who” that you have become.

The first issue, then, is not how to do more work, or how to get more things done. It is not a matter of priorities, routine, best practice or time and motion studies. The issue is “Who are you?”

What kind of person are you? Do you know diligence? Do you have a faithful spirit? Do you make wise choices? Are you compulsive? Do you let work or other people’s demands rule your life? Have you given up on things? Just how much have you given up on?

Become a Better You

As you become a better you, by developing godly character, doing things as if for God and not for yourself, you will be better able to manage the issues of your life.

Your workload is an issue of your life. It is not your life. Your time is an issue of your life. It is not your life.

Your character IS your life. WHO you are is what your life is all about. You will face eternal consequences for who you are, not for the way you managed time or processed work.

My advice? Become a better you. Call on God’s grace to transform you and your attitudes and character, until the tasks and choices that confront you are met by someone with godly wisdom and divine grace.